South Korea voted for a new president on Tuesday, with exit polls showing liberal Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party (DP) set to ride a wave of unease about the economy and political instability to a victory expected to have ramifications for Seoul’s relations with Tokyo.
Lee, the front-runner in the race since campaigning began May 12, secured 51.7% of the vote — a 12.4 percentage point lead on his closest competitor, conservative rival Kim Moon-soo of the governing People Power Party (PPP), who garnered 39.3% of the vote, according to exit poll data jointly compiled and released major broadcasters KBS, MBC and SBS after voting wrapped up at 8 p.m. Another right-leaning candidate, the Reform Party's Lee Jun-seok, received 7.7% support.
South Korea’s National Election Commission said that 79.4% of the country’s 44.39 million eligible voters had cast their ballots in the vote, the highest rate since the 1997 election, when the turnout hit 80.7%.
The electoral commission is scheduled to certify the result on Wednesday and the new president's inauguration is expected within hours.
DP leaders and campaign officials had gathered at the National Assembly, erupting into cheers as the exit poll results were announced, livestreamed footage showed.
Park Chan-dae, acting party leader, hailed the poll numbers, saying that voters had made a "fiery judgment against the insurrection regime," local media reported.
The snap election came exactly six months after then-President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law only to rescind it hours later, unsettling many South Koreans who saw the move as a stark reminder of the country’s authoritarian past. Yoon was impeached by the National Assembly on Dec. 14, with the country’s Constitutional Court upholding his ouster in April.
Speaking after the exit poll announcement, the co-chair of the PPP's election committee expressed dismay over Kim's electoral trouncing.
"We expected to be either slightly behind or in a slight lead but it is very disappointing that there is such a significant gap ... we find it to be somewhat shocking," local media quoted Rep. Na Kyung-won as saying.
Lee, who lost by a razor-thin margin to Yoon in the 2022 election, had consistently held commanding leads in opinion polls since entering the race, making his victory all but preordained.
The next president — who will take office immediately for a single, five-year term and will not have the advantage of a formal transition, unlike his predecessors — will face the immediate challenge of stabilizing the country after months of political turmoil that fractured South Korea along ideological lines and threw the economy into a state of limbo.
First and foremost, he will be expected to tackle a deepening economic downturn and shepherd through tough tariff negotiations with the United States, which has slapped its South Korean ally with tough levies on key exports such as steel, aluminum and automobiles.
In a nationwide survey conducted early last month by the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper, 40.7% of respondents said “revitalizing the economy and securing future growth engines” would be the next president’s most pressing task. Resolving social conflict and promoting national unity was a distant second, at 21.7%.
The new president will also be thrust into tackling the country’s rapidly graying population and plummeting birth rate, an urgent demographic crisis also seen in neighboring Japan and China. Young couples and singles commonly complain about the soaring costs of child care, discrimination against working parents and gender inequality.
With women making up 50.5% of South Korea’s eligible voters, the demographic could have a sizable impact on the result despite all of the candidates remaining in the race being men — the first time since 2007 that no women are in the final lineup. South Korea has elected only one female leader: Park Geun-hye, who took office in 2013 but was formally removed in 2017 following her impeachment several months earlier.
But the results will also have far-ranging foreign policy implications, including for closer relations with Japan and the U.S., as well as soured ties with China. The result could also signal a shift in South Korea’s approach to nuclear-armed North Korea.
Lee Jae-myung’s ascendance to the nation’s highest office would be the culmination of an extraordinary effort to recast himself from a leftwing populist into a more palatable figure for moderate swing voters — a move widely referred to in South Korean slang as “right-clicking.”
A key feature of this image shift had been his positive remarks about the U.S. alliance and the need for continued cooperation with neighboring Japan — a departure from his party’s leftist-nationalist reputation and his history of seemingly anti-Japan rhetoric.
In the run-up to the election, Lee played down his hard-line views on South Korea’s tumultuous relationship with Japan — this includes his fierce opposition to the Yoon administration's third-party compensation plan for Korean wartime laborers at Japanese factories and mines before and during World War II.
Tokyo’s stance is that all such claims were settled “completely and finally” under a 1965 agreement that normalized bilateral ties and saw Japan pay $500 million to South Korea.
Japanese officials have been watching the election closely for any signals of a potential shift on the wartime labor agreement or a broaching of the sensitive issue of “comfort women,” a euphemism for those who suffered under Japan’s wartime military brothel system.
Lee has said in recent months that he would take a “pragmatic” approach to ties if elected and wouldn’t reverse the agreements that led to a thaw in ties under Yoon, including boosted trilateral military cooperation with South Korea and Japan’s mutual ally, the U.S.
“There is a preconception that I am hostile toward Japan,” Lee said two weeks ago. “Japan is a neighboring country, and we must cooperate with each other to create synergy.”
In an appeal to U.S. President Donald Trump, the DP candidate said he would support any rekindling of summit diplomacy between the American leader and North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un. Trump met with Kim three times during his first stint in office. Though denuclearization talks ultimately faltered, he has expressed an interest in meeting with Kim again at some point during his second term.
The DP has also laid the groundwork for appealing to Trump’s ego by filing paperwork recommending that the Norwegian Nobel Committee consider nominating the U.S. leader for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for his “promotion of peace on the Korean Peninsula.”
But it’s unclear if this will be enough to stave off the threat of looming tariffs imposed by Trump, which are likely to prove a vexing issue for South Korea’s next president. Seoul has sought to secure an exemption from Washington on the measures, though without much success.
Trump said on Friday that he planned to hike tariffs on imported steel and aluminum to 50% from 25% starting Wednesday, ratcheting up pressure on South Korea, the fourth-biggest exporter of steel to the U.S., according to data from the American Iron and Steel Institute.
South Korea had agreed in late April to draft a package deal on trade by the end of a 90-day pause on Trump’s reciprocal tariffs in July, but negotiators in Seoul have emphasized the difficulty of reaching such a deal due to the political leadership vacuum there.
And while Yoon skewed closer to the U.S. on Washington’s China policy in the Sino-U.S. rivalry, Lee has publicly signaled that a softer touch with Beijing would be in the cards if he is elected — a stance unlikely to engender goodwill from the Trump administration.
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